Every art show is a labor of love – a testament to the trials of the artist involved and a display of the fruits of the effort. Not every day, however, does an art show strike so deeply into the human condition and emerge with what I call a victory tale about overcoming… or perhaps managing… a host of trials like the one now on display at Scalehouse Gallery in downtown Bend. It’s also not every day that there’s a full bed in the gallery.
Artist Teafly, who uses both they and she pronouns, has filled the space with their colorful and insightful work — both a retrospective of the artist’s 20 years in Bend, as well as a visual representation of their new book, “So You Have a Little Brain Cloud: A Beginner’s Guide to Living With Mental Illness.” (Disclosure: Teafly is a friend and a regular contributor to the Source Weekly’s cover art… which is also on display as part of the exhibit.)
Among the insights Teafly shares in the book is a recollection of how getting good sleep has helped them live a better life. Not covered in detail in the book, but shared in the gallery, is information about the artist’s journey with sleep apnea and bipolar disorder, and how getting adequate sleep helped them experience more well-being. I sat down with Teafly – on the bed, of course – for this conversation, edited for length.
Source Weekly: Tell us a little bit about the recent book.
Teafly: The Brain Cloud book came about because I live with mental illness, and it’s hard. It’s hard to talk about, and it’s a little scary to talk about, and there’s a lot of fear in talking about it. And I, as I kept thinking about that… well, isn’t that exactly why we make art? Because art is always an easier way to understand difficult things — it kind of comforts us while simultaneously challenging us. Art can do that.
And so I thought well, you know, this is what your experience is, right? And I’ve worked really hard in the last 10 years to be medication free, and that’s not an easy thing to do. If you have a diagnosed mental illness — and I always say to people, I don’t suggest it, right? — Everybody is different, and you should do what’s right for you. It takes a lot of work for me to not be on medication. And one of the things I think people deeply misunderstand is that medication doesn’t work for everyone; medication isn’t also there to make you “normal,” and I think the biggest thing with mental illnesses, there is no normal, whether you have a mental illness or not, right?
And a lot of times we define disability, simply in conjunction with capitalism. If you can’t work a 40 hours, if you can’t lift 50 pounds, if you can’t stand for 40 hours, we consider you disabled in this country, and that just seems absurd to me.
I can’t necessarily work full time and care for my health, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have value. It doesn’t mean that I don’t contribute to the community. It doesn’t mean that my life isn’t good and beautiful. It just means it doesn’t live up to what others’ expectations are. I wanted to dive a little bit into the process of recreating this book.
SW: What were the first kernels of this book?
T: I think I knew for a long time I needed to write about this, because that’s what artists do, right? Like, what’s the point of anything if it’s not personal or not true to you? But again, there’s a lot of fear to it. And then I have a friend. She was cutting my hair one day, and she told me that she has bipolar. And I don’t know if I told her first and that prompted her to tell me, but we had this really lovely, long conversation. And I walked away realizing, you know, I had kind of given her a lot of like, “this is how I view it and this is how I see it.” And I walked away feeling like it helps so much to talk about it, and I’m not alone. I’ve seen — someone finds out that I live with a mental illness, they almost immediately, if they live with one, will tell me. And then they’ll say, “I don’t tell people, I never told anybody, you’re the only person I’ve said this to,” and I deeply understand that, and so I thought, well, you know, let’s put all these things down in a book.
SW: OK, so we’re in this bed. What are we doing in this bed?
T: I have severe sleep apnea. And what that means is you stop breathing in your sleep. And severe means you stop breathing 30 times an hour. But I stopped breathing at 80 to 90 times an hour. This started when I was 14 years old, and it was not diagnosed until I was 34 years old. And so, I experienced severe sleep deprivation for a very long time. I’ve now had medical care for the last 14 years, and my life is significantly changed. But the thing I’ve learned about sleep, when you don’t sleep for that long, you really start to understand what happens when you don’t sleep. And then you also really start to be able to recognize what happens when you do. I think the majority of the world is not sleeping enough, and I think we don’t talk about sleep as a basic human need in the way that we talk about food or water or shelter. Really, the act of physical sleep is medicine for everybody, just as long as you’re doing it right, because I wasn’t doing it right.
Thu., Sept. 21, 6-9pm
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This article appears in Source Weekly September 7, 2023.
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